Learn How to Create Welsh Plurals

While Welsh is in many ways more regular than English (for example, in its spelling system), lluosogion, or plurals are unfortunately an area in which Welsh is very irregular indeed!

In Welsh, there are several ways of forming plurals, which are often used in combination with each other. BBC Bitesize provides a helpful list, which I’ve adapted for our purposes below:

• adding a plural suffix (ending)
• changing a vowel
• removing a singular suffix
• using a plural form similar to the loan language (usually English)

As mentioned above, it is common for more than one of these changes to be applied to a singular to create a plural. For instance, take the transition from blodyn (flower) to blodau (flowers). Here, the singular suffix -yn is removed, and the plural suffix -au is added.

Let’s look at another example. How do we get from plentyn (child) to plant (children)?

Whereas in English, most plurals are formed by simply adding the letter s, there are many possible ôl-ddodiaid (suffixes) that are used to create a plural in Welsh. Before we continue, let’s take a look at a list of them, starting with the most common and working our way down:

You can see some examples of vowel changes above, such as bugail changing to bugeil- in the plural. There are many plurals in Welsh that are formed purely through vowel change, similarly to words like goose/geese and man/men in English. These are very irregular and need be memorised, but there are some broad patterns that it might help you to know:

Examples of vowel changes that don’t follow these rules include:

• alarch (swan) and elyrch (swans)
• dafad (sheep, singular) and defaid (sheep, plural)
• cyllell (knife) and cyllyll (knives)
• maneg (glove) and menig (gloves)

Very broadly, with many exceptions, you can expect a and e to appear in the singular forms, and e and y to appear in the plurals.

Possibly the most unique type of plural in Welsh is the collective form. These words are plurals by default, and an ending (usually -en for feminine words, or -yn for masculine words) needs to be added to make the word singular. This rule is for the most part used for things that usually appear in groups. This reminds me of the English words sheep and fish – these are animals that usually appear in large groups, and the usual rules of plural and singular don’t apply.

Certain words in Welsh, often short words with highly irregular plurals, have themselves become suffixes, so it’s especially important to get the hang of their plural forms. One of the most common is the word gŵr (man, husband) and its plural, gwŷr (men, husbands). The soft mutated forms of these words (ŵr and wŷr) have become roughly equivalent to the English -er and -ers respectively. For instance:

The same is true of the word gwraig (woman, wife) and its plural, gwragedd, which is a bit like the English suffix -ess (as in actress, goddess, lioness):

Note, however, that these feminine forms are falling out of use, and most Welsh people will use the -wr form regardless of gender. It’s good to be able to recognise these feminine forms, but you will sound rather old-fashioned if you use them outside of a formal context.

Another example of a highly irregular plural turning into a suffix is the word tŷ (house) and its plural, tai (houses). You will also see their soft-mutated versions, dŷ and dai used in some cases.

If you made it all the way to the end of this article – well done! There’s a lot to take in when learning about plurals in Welsh. My advice to you is to always learn the plural of a word alongside the word itself. For example, if you’re learning about plants, you might recite to yourself: blodyn/blodau, coeden/coed, gwraidd/gwreiddiau. And if you get completely stuck, the most common plural ending is -au; just stick it on the end of the singular form and a native speaker will probably understand you and help you out!